Vollmann makes use of many historical figures as characters including composer Dmitri Shostakovich, artist Käthe Kollwitz, film director Roman Karmen, poet Anna Akhmatova, SS officer Kurt Gerstein, as well as German general Friedrich Paulus and Soviet general Andrey Vlasov.
Mothers And Sons – a double portrait of the German sculptor Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945), who created "The Grieving Parents," a memorial to her son who died in WWI, and the contemporary German-American sculptor Suse Lowenstein, who created a work to honor her son, a victim in the 1988 Lockerbie disaster.
The German Peasants' War was a violent revolution which took place in Southern Germany in the early years of the Reformation, beginning in 1525; peasants who had been treated as slaves took arms against feudal lords and the church.
He was also influenced in his youth by the robust style of German printmaker Käthe Kollwitz and Austrian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka.
In 1992, he returned again to an art-historical theme in My German Trip, in which Colescott imagines encounters with the great German printmakers Albrecht Dürer, Käthe Kollwitz, Otto Dix, George Grosz, and members of the German Expressionists, with highly comic results.
As well as the workers' parties, the referendum campaign was publicly supported by the ADGB, the Red Front League and a number of prominent figures, such as Albert Einstein Kathe Kollwitz, John Heartfield and Kurt Tucholsky for the referendum.
Ascher met the artists of the Blue Rider and befriended the artists of the satirical German weekly magazine Simplicissimus, among others Gustav Meyrink, Alfred Kubin, George Grosz and Käthe Kollwitz.
The WIR was supported by numerous left intellectuals, among them Martin Andersen Nexö, Henri Barbusse, Maxim Gorki, George Grosz, Maximilian Harden, Arthur Holitscher, Käthe Kollwitz, George Bernard Shaw, Upton Sinclair and Ernst Toller.